


And an open door is to me now

by hollimichele



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-31
Updated: 2011-08-31
Packaged: 2017-10-23 07:29:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/247728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollimichele/pseuds/hollimichele
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lenore's had a long life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And an open door is to me now

**Author's Note:**

> Written August 2007, for the spn_xx challenge.

When I was young I spoke like a child, and I saw with a child's eyes  
And an open door was to a girl like the stars are to the sky  
It's funny how the world lives up to all of your expectations  
With adventures for the stout of heart, and the lure of the open spaces

There's two lanes running down this road, whichever side you're on  
Accounts for where you want to go, or what you're running from  
Back when darkness overtook me on a blind man's curve

I relied upon the moon, I relied upon the moon  
I relied upon the moon and Saint Christopher

Now I've paid my dues 'cause I have owed them, but I've paid a price sometimes  
For being such a stubborn woman in such stubborn times  
Now I have run from the arms of lovers, I've run from the eyes of friends  
I have run from the hands of kindness, I've run just because I can

But now I've grown and I speak like a woman and I see with a woman's eyes  
And an open door is to me now like the saddest of goodbyes  
When it's too late for turning back, I pray for the heart and the nerve

And I rely upon the moon, I rely upon the moon  
I rely upon the moon and Saint Christopher

I rely upon the moon, I rely upon the moon  
I rely upon the moon and Saint Christopher to be my guide.

\--Mary Chapin Carpenter

 

******

 

The first time Lenore saw the inside of a movie house, she'd been dead almost a day. There'd been a theater at the county seat, back home, but that was more miles and money than they could have spared away, and the purse strings only got tighter in the drought and the Dust Bowl. She saw Bible pictures and the like a few times, projected onto a sheet on the side of someone's barn, but she knew that was nothing next to the theaters they had in California, all gold and red velvet.

Not that there was money for movie theaters, once they got to California. Or time for them, either, with the baby dead of pneumonia halfway through the long trip west, and Mama dead of pneumonia and grief soon after. Lenore found herself in charge of the children that were left, hating it and feeling guilty for hating it. So when Daddy and the older boys couldn't find enough work, Lenore was only too glad to let the children be in charge of themselves for a while, and go out looking for a job of her own.

How that led her to the alley behind a movie house, watching a man drink all the blood out of some poor idiot who'd attacked her for the few dollars in her pocket-- well. Lenore never was completely sure. She was scared, but not scared enough to run, so when the man dropped the bloodless body to the ground and stepped towards her in his shiny shoes, his fine suit, Lenore took the hand he offered before she knew what she was getting.

When she woke up again, the man told her his name was Cal, that he was a vampire, and that she was one too, now.

At first she worried about Daddy and the children, but she was dead, wasn't she? And they seemed so far away, somehow, not her concern anymore: the Hooverville tent, the rattletrap truck, her brothers and sisters crying over their empty bellies. She was going to live forever, Cal said, and never age a day, and always be beautiful.

So she picked out the richest-looking man she saw walking down the street, and she and Cal killed him and took all his money. Lenore took his coat and shoes, too, as an afterthought, and wrapped them up in a bundle for Daddy with a note and most of the money. The rest they used to buy Lenore a dress, and new earrings, and two tickets to the grandest gold-and-velvet palace in the state of California.

******

When the war started, Cal said it was probably patriotic to kill Japs. The newsreels sure made it look that way after you watched enough of them, and Lenore had seen so many that it sort of seemed un-American to disagree. But they all got sent east, pretty soon, away from the coasts, so Lenore didn't worry about it.

Cal had a tough time during the war. He'd fought in the last one, back when he was alive, and he never got used to the dirty looks he got for being tall and handsome and healthy-looking, with so many off fighting. Lenore got dirty looks too, from girls whose boys were shipped out or wounded or worse, but she never minded much, not when she had Cal to twirl her on the dance floor, or lean her head against while Bogey and Bacall flickered across the big screen.

It was right after V-E Day when she met her first vampires besides Cal. They'd been together seven, eight years, by then, mostly moving around California; Lenore thought she'd seen the inside of every dance hall in the state by '42. But one day, coming back to their room after a night out, one day he just asked if she'd like to meet some friends of his, and they stole a car and headed east. There were a dozen or so of them, and they'd taken over a ghost town at the edge of the Dust Bowl, where they could lure in travelers passing through. Lenore couldn't say she liked them, the blank feral hunger in their eyes, their ragged clothes and brokedown houses. They weren't a patch on Cal, who always parted his hair neatly and shined up his shoes. They didn't stay long.

Maybe a year after that, they ran into one of them in Chicago, a man named Luther. He told them hunters had wiped out the whole bunch. Cal had told Lenore about hunters-- that if they got too sloppy, killed too many humans in one place, that there were humans who'd take notice and go after them. That was why there were so few of their kind left, he said. When vampires didn't have the sense to blend in and keep moving, they might as well paint targets on themselves for some bunch of humans who put too much stock in Bela Lugosi. A smart vampire moved with the times, Cal said, and a stupid one wound up dead.

Luther's bunch, as far as Lenore could tell, were plenty smart; it was vicious that was the problem. She hadn't seen it when it was just her and Cal and the other vampires, but in Chicago Luther moved through the crowds of humans like something waiting to go for the throat. Lenore couldn't imagine he'd last long, alone like that. She was just glad that, of all the vampires in all the world, she had Cal.

******

They spent most of the '50s in Vegas. Cal had a good eye for mob money, and Lenore learned how to flirt with low-ranking gangsters, to lure them out to the the alleys behind the casinos where she and Cal would drain them dry and empty their pockets. She never felt as glamorous as she did in the '50s. Cal was so sharp in his suits and his shark's grin, and she had a new dress for every dead mobster: wasp-waisted day dresses, slinky cocktail sheaths, and once a floor-length sweep of ball gown that made her glitter from head to toe.

God, that ball gown. They stumbled back to their room near dawn that night, giddy and secondhand drunk; Cal's bow tie undone, Lenore's shoes hanging from her wrist by their straps. They didn't even make it to the bed. She just wrapped her legs around Cal's waist, let him fumble at her layers of skirt, while she worked at his tuxedo until she hit skin. He pressed her back into the wall and pushed into her in one perfect movement, and it was very little time before she came so hard she bit him on the shoulder with all her teeth. He bucked raggedly as he got close, and muffled his shout into the side of Lenore's throat. Then they peeled their clothes off gently, carefully, and did it all again only slower. The next night, he took her dancing.

It couldn't last, of course, not as careless as they were in those days. For all Cal talked about moving faster than the humans-- well, he though that meant dressing better than them, and they both acted like 'low profile' meant only killing a dozen people before they moved on. Hunters caught up with them in '56, and it was only luck that they were too dumb to know what killed vampires. But they knew about dead men's blood, and they thought staking Cal out for the sun would kill him, so by the time Lenore found him he looked like a barbecue.

It was more than a year before he recovered, really, and they spent most of it moving constantly, too scared to stay still. Lenore stole a nurse's uniform, and got good enough at looking like she was supposed to be wearing it that she could walk out of any hospital with as much blood as they needed. She thought once Cal was better, things would go back to the way they had been.

He didn't; of course he didn't. Even once he was healed, he hardly went out of doors, and then only with a hat pulled low to hide the worst of the damage. And he got more careless than he'd ever been, stopped looking for kills no one would miss, just tried to spend as little time outside as he could. A few times he grabbed the first person he saw, hardly even bothering to pull them into the privacy of an alley. About the only place he'd go with Lenore was the movies, and she could tell that wasn't because he liked it. It was dark and no one looked at him, that was all, and if a theater was empty enough sometimes he could kill someone in the back row.

If things kept up the way they were, no hunter with half a brain would miss them, and Lenore figured most hunters had at least half a brain. And then Lenore came home one night and found a girl, not eight years old, her body hanging limp and haphazard over the arm of the sofa. She was wearing a Western shirt and jeans and a crackerjack sheriff's star. Her open eyes were cloudy. Lenore closed them before she went into the bedroom.

Cal was asleep on his stomach, unheeding, his gory mouth smearing the white pillowcase. The left side of his face, the worst-damaged, wasn't showing. On that side, his mouth slanted down, pulled by scar tissue; on that side he had half an ear. His chest and shoulders, Lenore knew, were worse than his face, but she couldn't see most of it, only the backs of his hands, the side of one arm.

Lenore knelt on Cal's back and cut off his head with a kitchen knife. It was slippery work by the end, his blood stinging her sliced-up knuckles, but she kept going until it was done. As she washed up, she cried a little, but Cal, her clever, funny Cal, had died in the Nevada desert, years ago. This was nothing more than clean-up, like a hunter burning the bones.

******

Lenore spent a while drifting after that, living mostly off blood banks and the occasional attempted mugger. She met other vampires, and some even seemed like real people, not the flat-eyed hyenas she remembered ran with Luther. In Louisiana, she met another hunter: a sweet, dumb Catholic boy named Sean, who'd signed up when his country called and landed on just about the first plane out to Vietnam. He came back a little smarter, and having seen an exorcism in Cambodia, a few hauntings in Laos, he thought he knew something worth a damn.

He didn't, of course, and Lenore wasn't about to tell him much. He was methodical, though. Not smart, but thorough, and he worked out that it'd been a decade or more since Lenore had killed anyone who didn't deserve it, and somehow guessed that even that was starting to pall.

He was the first human Lenore slept with since she died. She'd fucked a few other vampires since Cal, but those were one-night things, the two of them sharing a bottle of blood or a warm body before they went their separate ways. Sean stuck around, digging and prying for that vast store of supernatural knowledge he seemed to be convinced she had, and finally she just got him drunk enough to stop asking questions.

Thing was, that turned out to be drunk enough to kiss her, and Lenore been adulterating her blood with whiskey all night. She stumbled backwards to her bed, Sean following all the way, and he was so very warm in her arms that she could pretend she wasn't being deeply stupid. He mumbled slurry nonsense in her ear the whole while, and in the morning he left a note. And that night, he came back.

But a month or so later, he didn't come back, from what he'd said would be a standard haunting. Lenore drove out to the house and found him dead at the foot of the stairs, his neck broken. The ghost he'd been after snapped and spun around her heels while she finished uncovering the bones Sean had found under the floorboards, poured the salt and kerosene, and lit the match. The ghost wailed as it burned, plucking at her hair and clothes with the wind it called up, but it couldn't do anything to her; she was already dead.

She'd hauled Sean's body out around the back of the house to bury him, and had the grave half-dug when she heard tires crunching on the gravel out front, and car doors slamming. A woman's voice called, "Sean? Sean, you in there?"

"Around the back," Lenore called in response, and after a moment she saw flashlight beams flickering their way towards her. They cost Lenore her night-vision, for a second, but it came back fast, and she saw the hunters: two women, sisters by the look of them, and a stocky man in a ski vest.

"I found him a little while ago," she said, hastily, when they saw Sean. "The ghost must have knocked him down the stairs; I already salted and burned it. You all knew him?"

"I-- yeah," said one of the women, shaken. She was pretty, dark-complected; more cocoa than her sister's coffee-and-cream. The man had his red hair buzzed short, and he was holding his shotgun like he wanted to be holding it on Lenore. But the other sister gave him a warning look, and he let the barrel rest on his shoulder.

"I'm Lenore," she said, "and I'm sorry about your friend, but we should get this dug before sunup. You got names?"

The first sister, it turned out, was Therese, and the other one was Elodie, and the man was Kevin and had been in the service with Sean. He didn't have any family to speak of, Kevin said, and there'd be too many questions if they took his body in and tried to get it buried at Arlington. So they helped her finish digging, and tucked a few holy cards and a St. Christopher's medallion into his pockets before they lowered him into the hole. Elodie prayed over the grave in French, and Therese added something in Latin that didn't sound like any Mass Lenore ever heard.

By the time the grave was filled in, and enough good-sized stones had been found to pick out a cross in the dirt at the head of the grave, it was getting on towards dawn. Not enough that the humans could see it coming, but Lenore could feel it, and it only made her more uneasy. She was nervous enough with the hunters' eyes all on her, uncomfortably aware of how she was the only one who didn't need a flashlight, of how her clothes were ten years out of date at least. She wondered how much Sean had told his friends.

There was a long pause, before Elodie said, "We've got a possession, out Fairfield way. Could use another pair of hands." Kevin raised an eyebrow at her, but she just shrugged, and turned her gaze on Lenore.

The possession, it turned out, was easy with four people. Lenore got the girl in an arm-lock while Therese did the exorcism, and the other two fired salt-filled rounds into the howling, hissing things whirling around outside the circle. Lenore hung on to so tight she dislocated the girl's shoulder, but the demon in her hardly reacted to that; instead, it glared at her, black-eyed, and snarled "Traitor!" before it came spewing out into the air.

Lenore didn't miss the look Elodie exchanged with her sister, or Kevin's scowl, but none of them said a word about it, just thanked her for her help and went on their way. Lenore stayed in Louisiana a long time, but she never had a bit of trouble from hunters or anyone else. She went back to Sean's grave a few times, to make sure it wasn't getting overgrown; she never saw another soul there, but there were new stones from time to time, the grass cut back, and, on her last visit, a set of dog tags with Kevin's name on them.

******

The next few decades were quiet; Lenore had learned at last to keep her head down. She put a name to the hollow, achy feeling in her chest: not the lack of a heartbeat, not guilt, but plain loneliness. So the next time she met another vampire she got on with, Lenore asked her to travel with her a while. And then the two of them met Eli, and Conrad, and Mary Beth, and they all got on well enough to stick together.

It was easier, somehow, with others around, though Lenore knew how dangerous it was: even if none of them killed humans when they could help it, they were still more mouths to feed, together. Sometimes Lenore was put in mind of her family, though even her littlest sisters must have been grandmothers by then. The worry was the same, the pressure of responsibility for the younger ones, the constant back-of-the mind math of clothes and rent and food.

But it didn't weigh as heavy as it did when Lenore was young, and she found she liked the company better than she disliked the responsibility. It was nice, to go to art-house theaters with Eli and reminisce about seeing the films first-run, back when men wore hats and women wore gloves, when people dressed up for the movies. Lenore wore jeans and boots, these days, and often put on flannel shirts that could have belonged to anybody in the house. Christina, who'd been a flower child before she died, still wore peasanty things, loose white cotton blouses, but the rest of them were more practical.

And then Gordon Walker caught their scent, and it all went to hell. They weren't expecting a hunter that smart and vicious, any of them, and he caught them flat-footed. They'd been ten, to start with, and they were down to seven before they stopped running long enough to make any kind of a plan. By then they were almost out of money, too, out of stolen blood, gasoline, luck: everything they needed to keep Walker from wiping them out.

Eli was all for just killing him. Lenore vetoed that right from the start, as appealing as it sounded. He'd have friends, and if Walker vanished on a hunt, others would come looking. No. Lenore knew Gordon's friends would be as mean and crazy as him, but that wasn't every hunter, any more than it was every human, or every vampire. What they needed were the other kind of hunters-- Sean's sort, willing to believe. Trusting, and trustworthy.

So they found a place to land for a few months, got jobs, killed some cattle as obviously as they could. That was hardly pretending, as hungry as they were by then, no matter how disgusting cow blood was. Then it was just a matter or waiting: for Walker to catch up, for a hunter who would listen to come around.

When Walker got Christina, they almost ran again, but Lenore said no. Running would only waste her death. And she was right: two handsome young men, with hunter written all over them, turned up in Eli's bar like clockwork. The only trouble was, Walker got to them first. Eli said one of them didn't take to Walker, though, and Lenore had to hope that would be enough.

They were too late to save Conrad, but they grabbed the hunter anyway, and once Lenore got a good look at him she knew he'd take their side. He was too smart for his own good, maybe-- seemed like hunters were getting smarter everywhere she looked-- but he wasn't vicious, and that was what counted.

So she sent him back, and sent Eli to get everyone ready to leave; if things didn't work out, she wanted to be gone. But Gordon Walker, three steps ahead of where she'd expected him to be, made that a little difficult.

The dead man's blood hurt more than Lenore could ever have imagined. Worse than dying had hurt, the first time, worse than the sun on the back of her neck as she'd hacked Cal free in the desert. But she thought of Eli and the others, who might still get away, and she didn't say a word to Walker or his knife.

And there was her hunter, and his friend-- his brother-- holding Walker off, and Lenore knew she'd chosen right.

Walker, though, Walker knew too much. The smell of blood-- fresh blood, live, human-- cut through the pain, through the fog in Lenore's head, and oh, it had been so long. It had been years, and she wanted, she wanted-- but no: this was what broke Cal, Lenore knew, but not her. Not ever. She put her teeth away.

The next thing Lenore knew, she was being lifted out of the chair, carried out of that house. She was dimly aware of voices, someone speaking low and soothing to her, someone else angry, but even that faded. For a little while, Lenore felt as though all her long life might have been a a dream, that it could be her oldest brother carrying her up the hill to the house after a tumble from the hayloft. Or her father, carrying her to the truck half-asleep, at the end of a night watching Bible pictures on the back wall of the church.

Even that faded, soon, and Lenore slipped into blackness.

Lenore woke up on the bench seat of Eli's truck, wedged in between him and Mary Beth. She didn't hurt-- or, rather, no one part of her hurt enough to stand out from the rest. Eli noticed her half-open eyes, and asked her how she was feeling. She patted his shoulder, her arm stiff with bandages.

"I'm all right," Lenore said. "We'll be fine."


End file.
